This is getting quite fascinating. If you have not been following the story, here is a
summary by Dan Parrotta of HBR:
Last week, Invisible Children launched a brilliant video aimed at making Ugandan rebel warlord Joseph Kony "famous" in the interest of capturing him and ending his reign of deranged brutality. The group hoped for half a million YouTube views by year end. They're up to 76 million today. And now they're being attacked — not by Kony, but by critics whose voices are raised louder about this video than they ever were by Kony's atrocities.
Founded by three college students in 2003, Invisible Children is a human rights organization. They intended to make a documentary on Darfur. Bullets in the direction of their truck in Uganda caused them to change direction. Instead of a film, they ended up creating a massive movement to save children from abduction into Kony's rebel army. Their movement has galvanized hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world. They raise in excess of $13 million annually.
What is interesting me is why something so - at first glance right-on and in support of the fight against poverty, war and injustice and so on and so forth, has not got its own twittercolour - no, despite being massively sucesful in capturing attention and driving activity, many of the Digerati just hate the idea that this has happened. What - the Digerati hate that people have designed a very succesful viral campaign that has created action againsts a Bad Person is bad? WTF, I hear you say. So, let me unpick it - here is first rank
Digeratiperson danah boyd
"To many people unfamiliar with Invisible Children, the Kony 2012 campaign looked like a brilliant example of “viral” media spread. The center of the campaign is a compelling 30-minute film where a father talks to his son about the evil practices of the Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony. The father makes it clear that his number one goal is to make Kony a household name in order to “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” In the days that followed, critics stepped up and critiqued the simplistic narrative (and colonial rhetoric) put forward by Invisible Children. (If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend Ethan Zuckerman’s “Unpacking Kony 2012.”) Yet, what about the media campaign itself? Activists (and brand marketers) everywhere are in awe of what appears to be a magical campaign that came out of nowhere. But there’s more than meets the eye here."
Ah yes, the "but" - but why the but?
"Much to the horror of many human rights activists, Invisible Children is not known for spreading accurate information as much as it’s known for spreading information widely. Most of how they’ve gotten the message out is by engaging youth. Earlier films have been shown directly to youth (in schools and churches) and youth are actively encouraged to join the organization and participate in their campaigns. They provide toolkits for participation with the primary goal being to amplify attention to a particular issue."
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The stories that Invisible Children create in their media put children at the front and center of them. And, indeed, as Neta Kliger-Vilenchik and Henry Jenkins explain, youth are drawn to this type of storytelling. Watch Kony 2012 from the perspective of a teenager or college student. Here is a father explaining to a small child what’s happening in Africa. If you’re a teen, you see this and realize that you too can explain to others what’s going on. The film is powerful, but it also models how to spread information. The most important thing that the audience gets from the film is that they are encouraged to spread the gospel. And then they are given tools for doing that. Invisible Children makes it very easy to share their videos, republish their messages on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr, and “like” them everywhere. But they go beyond that; they also provide infrastructure to increase others’ attention.
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The initial tweets that came out came from seemingly disconnected youth living in Midwestern and Southern towns who frequently refer to Christian values in their bios. In other words, these tweets appear to be coming from communities that Invisible Children had already activated prior to launching Kony 2012. Not only did they then each turn on, but they spread the messages to their friends. This allowed the conversation to “pop” and then spread. The one profile that does have a lot of cluster is the Invisible Children profile, highlighting how their audience was indeed ready to respond to them. But you also see tight clusters that geographically disparate who bridged from the organization and then spread in their local community with a level of intense density. With this kind of graph structure, it’s not surprising that it quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. And then, it could easily spread. Attention begets attention.
So, in summary, they have been very successful using the exact same tactics that every other Person With A Message and a Cause uses social media for, they have:
- Put their message out with Inaccurate Information (Read - Accentuate polarities, no nuance, dropping Inconvenient Truths etc etc) and use the Impressionable Youth to spread it
- Used clear narrative storytelling and calls to action, and usage of viral social media tools - especialy video - to distribute the message.
- Pre-seeding the message in key communities Omigod. (No doubt they will soon uncover dreadful practices, like sockpuppeting and even false testimony - I mean, whoever would imagine people would do that?)
So, not really "more to it than meets the eye" here. They have used exactly the techniques that all the the Social Media Advocates have been advocating and practicing for years. To think that these techniques are only going to be available to The Guys We Like is naive. The other complaint is about the target. Ethan Zuckerman, whose opinion I respect a lot,
writes:
To raise awareness of Kony, Russell urges viewers of the video to contact 20 “culturemakers” and 12 policymakers who he believes can increase the visibility of the LRA and increase chances of Kony’s arrest. More concretely, Russell wants to ensure that the 100 military advisors the Obama government has provided remain working with the Ugandan military to help capture and arrest Kony.
But its not as if no-one has tried these methods before. Its not just the Social Mediarati who are aghast, a plethora of "helping" interests are upset as well:
As a set of Kony-related hashtags trended on Twitter yesterday, some prominent African and Afrophile commentators pointed out that the Invisible Children campaign gives little or no agency to the Ugandans the organization wants to help. There are no Africans on the Invisible Children board of directors and few in the senior staff. And the Invisible Children approach focuses on American awareness and American intervention, not on local solutions to the conflicts in northern Uganda. This led Ugandan blogger and activist Teddy Ruge – who works closely on community development projects in Uganda – to write a post responding to the Invisible Children campaign titled “A piece of my mind: Respect my agency 2012“, asking supporters of Invisible Children to consider whether IC’s framing of the situation is a correct one, whether IC’s efforts focus too heavily on sustaining the organization, and whether a better way to support people of northern Uganda would be to work with community organizations focusing on rebuilding displaced communities.
Now don't get me wrong - I know full well that things are more complicated, more nuanced, not so easy, as this campaign is making it out to be. But, at this point I do also detect the sound of harrumphing vested interests, the murmurs of Not Invented Here (or even Done Better There) echoing round the ranks. In other words, one could read this as Turf being trampled on. And where turf is trampled on, Ad-Hominems soon follow - and here they are: As a charity, these people only spend 1/3rd of their money on Uganda!
The Visible Children tumblr points out that Invisible Children spends less than a third of the money they’ve raised on direct services in northern Uganda and bordering areas. The majority of their funding is focused on advocacy, filmmaking and fundraising.
But, as we pointed out years ago and many a time, few charities spend that much on their cause, a lot is sucked up in - ahem "operating costs" - the industry overall is at best inefficient (and resists all attempts to measure it), at worst it is
a scam. I am shocked - shocked I tell you - that these critics apparently didn't know that (Well, I think they do, but they are not exercised by it when it is their own friends. Which is why this - like Bob Geldof's Live Aid at the time - ruffles feathers). In fact to me, these guys look better than many charities in that at least we know that some of the rest of the money is going into advocacy for their cause. I mean imagine that, a charity spending money advocating their cause? Revolutionary stuff, no?. Exactly. They are aiming for a revolution.
Parrotti summarises what Invisible Children is being criticized for:
1. Being a niche cause, and not combating the atrocities of the overall Ugandan military establishment (and wider warlordism).
2. Not giving adequate weight to the fact that Kony is now outside of Uganda with a weakened force of several hundred members.
3. Spending too much money on film and media.
4. Making it harder to capture Kony by spotlighting him.
But, as Parrotti points out, the approach used over the last 16 years hasn't exactly worked well and in 16 days this will do more.
"The children are now visible. Case closed. If only more humanitarian organizations had such success toward their missions."
Parotti also believes there's something bigger going on here, the rediscovery of activism and hope.
In the 1960s, critics whined that the money spent to go to the moon was more than it was worth. They didn't get that it wasn't about collecting moon rocks. It was about collecting passion and aiming it at something impossible. It was about demonstrating to ourselves that we were underestimating our potential by massive orders of magnitude. They didn't get the impact of millions of eight year-old kids watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, whispering to ourselves, "My God, anything is possible."
You should see the light in the eyes of the college kids engaged in Invisible Children's mission. That's the larger value of what these guys have created. A generation of kids believing again that they can change the world, and seeing themselves accomplish it.
I think he is onto something. These people have used Social Media tools extremely well to generate a huge amount of activity in a niche area where all the kings horses and men so far have done sweet Fanny Adams. There is a fascinating exchange between a commetator and Ethan on his blog: One "Erin" says, if this is Bad then:
… what CAN we do? Much of the appeal of Kony2012 is that it gives us white, American liberals a method to engage and do SOMETHING with our bleeding hearts. I have no doubt of the complexity of the problem, and I appreciate the detailed blog post you’ve written. But you’ve made the same omission as many others who’ve written truthful narratives about Africa: you’ve left us with the impression that there is no solution, because all the players are bad and untrustworthy, so we shrug our shoulders, blame the Africans, and turn away. Give us hope; point us toward a solution; give us something specific and achievable to do! This is what Invisible Children has appreciated about human psychology and has done so effectively.
Ethan replies:
Erin, thanks for the comment. You’re right that my post doesn’t give “white American liberals a method to engage and so SOMETHING with our bleeding hearts.” For one thing, I’m not sure the LRA is the issue I’d urge people to engage with right now – I think pressuring the US to take the lead on Syria is likely a higher priority.
Here’s what I do as a white American liberal focused on sub-Saharan Africa:
- I write about a range of stories about issues on the continent. Some look at tragic situations like northern Uganda (which I’ve been writing about since 2006). Some look at stories of innovation and creativity on the continent. I try to feature a variety of views of a complicated continent, because looking at Africa in terms of crisis and failure ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- I support local, African-led organizations that work on problems in their community, through financial support, writing about their work, and in a few cases, sitting on their boards of directors.
- I support organizations like Medicines Sans Frontieres that have consistently done important work providing health and medical care to people affected by conflicts in Central Africa and elsewhere. I pick these organizations because they spend less money on “awareness-raising” and advocacy and more funds on the ground.
I don’t know if those approaches will help you in your quest for something “specific and achievable”, but I’ve found it more satisfying than supporting efforts like this one.
While I respect Ethan a lot, I think that tells you, in one reply, why the world is a-changing. Putting it another way.
(i) The current established structures are palpably not delivering the goods.
(ii) There is now a proven alternative. From the start of the Arab Spring, it has been clear that Social Media can become a tool of the real actives and activists, not just armchair ones. Twitter avatar colour changing was replaced with co-ordinating real revolutions. Fence sitting has not worked, getting off the fence has had results. One definition of insanity is to believe more of the same will yield different results, so the Old is discredited.
(iii) It is not just a few self selecting Social Mediarati who can make Social Media work, when they said the Man of the Year is You, it really meant You, not The Experts
The Social Media Pandora's Box has been opened, and All Of You are using it. It isn't going to close again. The Digerati love to rail against the Olde Structures, but did not realise some of those pulled down would be beloved ones. The lessons from history of all revolutions in communications is that they are revolutionary socially too.
The times, they are a' changing.....
